February 23

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Connecticut Gazette (February 23, 1776).

“Sold by the Printer hereof … COMMON SENSE.”

On February 23, 1776, Timothy Green, the printer of the Connecticut Gazette, announced the publication of yet another local edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.  He joined other printers in publishing, advertising, and disseminating the incendiary political pamphlet far beyond Philadelphia, where Robert Bell published and advertised the first edition on January 9.  Since then, Bell produced an unauthorized second edition and Paine worked with William Bradford and Thomas Bradford, the printers of the Pennsylvania Journal, on an expanded new edition (and they engaged in a public argument about the competing editions in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and other newspapers published in Philadelphia).  The Bradfords also informed readers that a German edition was in the works.  In addition, they indicated that they would fill an order from Virginia for one thousand copies.  It did not take long for William Green, a bookseller and bookbinder in New York, to advertise copies of Bell’s first and second editions.  John Anderson, the printer of the Constitutional Gazette in New York, soon marketed the first local edition published beyond Philadelphia.  By the middle of February, John Carter, the printer of the Providence Gazette, advised readers that his local edition would hit the market within a week.

That edition went on sale at the same time that Green released a local edition in New London.  According to the advertisement, Judah P. Spooner, his brother-in-law and former apprentice who operated a printing office in Norwich, sold the pamphlet there as well.  The imprint on the title page suggested that Green and Spooner collaborated as publishers, but Spooner did the printing: “Philadelphia: Printed.  Norwich: Re-printed and sold by Judah P. Spooner, and by T. Green, in New-London.”  Green gave their advertisement a privileged place in the Connecticut Gazette, placing it immediately after updates from Hartford.  That made it difficult for readers to miss.  He did not, however, include elements that often appeared in advertisements for other editions in other newspapers, such as the list of section headers that outlined the contents or the epigraph from “Liberty,” a poem by James Thomson.  Lack of space may have prevented Green from publishing a more elaborate advertisement, though he may have considered the buzz around Common Sense sufficient to sell it once prospective customers knew where to purchase a local edition.

Slavery Advertisements Published February 23, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Gazette (February 23, 1776).

**********

Connecticut Gazette (February 23, 1776).

**********

Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (February 23, 1776).

**********

Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (February 23, 1776).

**********

Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (February 23, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published February 23, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Gazette (February 23, 1776).

**********

Henrich Millers Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote (February 23, 1776).

February 22

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update, Guest Contribution , , , , , , , ,

GUEST CURATOR:  Madison Sandusky

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Evening Post (February 22, 1776).

“THE MILITARY GUIDE for YOUNG OFFICERS.  By THOMAS SIMES, Esq.”

Several printers in Philadelphia advertised “THE MILITARY GUIDE for YOUNG OFFICERS” by Thomas Simes in February 1776.  The manual was published in 1776 and contained a compilation of “works of several military authors, including Humphrey Bland and the comte de Saxe.”  When the American Revolution began in 1775, military manuals, such as the one Simes wrote, became popular among young men preparing to join the war and those who had already joined. According to the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, “to meet the demand for military texts, a flood of printings began to appear from the American presses.”  Additionally, the advertisement above, published in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, which was a newspaper located in Philadelphia, displays how that flood of printing was “centered in Philadelphia, where more than thirty works on military subjects were published in the years 1775 and 1776 alone.”  The advertisement briefly summarizes the book, stating that it included “the experience of many brave heroes in critical situations, for the use of young warriors” to entice the target audience of young men who would serve as officers to purchase the book as a helpful guide. The advertisement even noted that the guide came with its own “explanatory DICTIONARY,” a bonus section. One signer of the Declaration of Independence, William Floyd, owned a copy of Simes’s guide, which can be taken as an indicator of both the quality and popularity of its contents.

**********

ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY:  Carl Robert Keyes

Robert Bell, the publisher of the first edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, continued his feud with William Bradford and Thomas Bradford, the printers of the Pennsylvania Journal, with a new advertisement in the February 22, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  Dissatisfied with Bell’s bookkeeping, Paine collaborated with the Bradfords on an expanded edition of his popular political pamphlet, yet Bell took an unauthorized second edition to press and simultaneously published diatribes about Paine and the Bradfords.  His latest advertisement would be the last in the series that attacked the author and his fellow printers.  It filled more than a column, starting on the third page of the February 22 issue of the Pennsylvania Evening Post and overflowing onto the fourth page.  The advertisement for Thomas Simes’s Military Guide for Young Officers, jointly published by Bell, Robert Aitken, and James Humphreys, Jr., immediately followed Bell’s advertisement.  In the column to the right, the Bradfords promoted their “NEW EDITION of COMMON SENSE, With ADDITIONS and IMPROVEMENTS,” and warned that the “Pamphlet advertised by Robert Bell intitled ADDITIONS to COMMON SENSE … consists of Pieces taken out of News Papers, and not written by the Author of COMMON SENSE.”

The advertisement for Simes’s Military Guide for Young Officers thus appeared in the middle of the controversy over the publication of new editions of Common Sense.  Unlike Bell’s questionable decision to produce a second edition of the political pamphlet and then attempt to capitalize off it by publishing another pamphlet of “ADDITIONS” drawn from newspapers rather than written by Paine, he collaborated with Aitken and Humphreys in producing the military manual “at the desire of several Members of the Honorable the Continental Congress, and some of the Military Officers of the Association.”  Bell (along with Aitken and Humphreys) had the right endorsements for an American edition of a manual previously published in London and the printers attempted to leverage that in marketing Simes’s Military Guide for Young Officers to prospective customers who, as Madison notes, could choose from among many similar works published in Philadelphia at the time.  In the Pennsylvania Evening Post, the advertisement appeared in the middle of the various notices in the February 22 edition, but two days later it had a privileged place in the Pennsylvania Ledger.  Humphreys, the printer of that newspaper, placed the advertisement on the first page, making it the first item in the first column.  The printers of the Pennsylvania Gazette gave the advertisement the same treatment in the February 28 edition of their newspaper.  The flamboyant Bell took a more measured approach to marketing the military manual compared to some of the other books and pamphlets he printed and, especially, his new editions of Common Sense.  Perhaps his partners in the endeavor took the lead in marketing Simes’s Military Guide for Young Officers.

Slavery Advertisements Published February 22, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Maryland Gazette (February 22, 1776).

**********

Maryland Gazette (February 22, 1776).

**********

New-York Journal (February 22, 1776).

**********

New-York Journal (February 22, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published February 22, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

New-York Journal (February 22, 1776).

**********

New-York Journal (February 22, 1776).

**********

New-York Journal (February 22, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Evening Post (February 22, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Evening Post (February 22, 1776).

February 21

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Gazette (February 21, 1776).

“THE NEW EDITION OF COMMON SENSE.”

“Large Additions to COMMON SENSE.”

Although Benjamin Towne most frequently published advertisements for Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in his Pennsylvania Evening Post, he was not the only printer in Philadelphia to generate revenue from advertisements for competing editions of the pamphlet.  Other newspapers also carried advertisements for Common Sense.  After Paine and Robert Bell, the publisher of the first edition, had a falling out, Bell went forward with an unauthorized second edition and Paine worked with William Bradford and Thomas Bradford, the printers of the Pennsylvania Journal, on an expanded edition that featured new material.  Not to be outdone, Bell advertised, published, and sold other supplementary material that he billed as “Large Additions to COMMON SENSE,” though Paine was not the author of those pieces that Bell instead reprinted from newspapers.  Bell and Paine and then Bell and the Bradfords engaged in bitter exchanges in their advertisements in the Pennsylvania Evening Post.

They also placed more subdued notices in other newspapers.  In the February 21, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, for instance, their advertisements ran one after the other.  In the first, the Bradfords announced that they “Just published … THE NEW EDITION OF COMMON SENSE: With Additions and Improvements in the Body of the Work.”  To entice readers to select their pamphlet, they added a nota bene that stated that the “Additions … amount to upwards of one Third of any former Editions.”  Customers could acquire this new edition from the Bradfords “at the London Coffee-house” and from associates in the book trades, including John Sparhawk, William Trickett, and William Woodhouse.  Immediately below that advertisement, Bell hawked his “Large Additions.”  He listed the contents, just as he had done in his first advertisements for the first edition of Common Sense.  He also declared that he added Paine’s “Address to the people called Quakers,” pirated from the Bradfords’ new edition.  Like Towne, the printers of the Pennsylvania Gazette, William Hall, David Hall, and William Sellers, did not need to sell a single copy of the pamphlet to generate revenue from it.  They made their money on Common Sense from the competing advertisements placed by Bell and the Bradfords!

Slavery Advertisements Published February 21, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Constitutional Gazette (February 21, 1776).

**********

Maryland Journal (February 21, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Gazette (February 21, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Journal (February 21, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published February 21, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Constitutional Gazette (February 21, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Gazette (February 21, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Gazette (February 21, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Journal (February 21, 1776).

**********

Pennsylvania Journal (February 21, 1776).

February 20

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Evening Post (February 20, 1776).

“Pieces taken out of News papers, and not written by the Author of COMMON SENSE.”

The final page of the Pennsylvania Evening Post was once again ground zero for the dispute between Robert Bell, the publisher of the first edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and subsequent unauthorized editions, and William Bradford and Thomas Bradford, the printers of the Pennsylvania Journal entrusted by Paine to publish a “NEW EDITION … With ADDITIONS and IMPROVEMENTS in the BODY of the WORK.”  Paine previously participated in the dispute, but he seemingly withdrew in favor of letting the printers duke it out in the public prints.

The Bradfords’ expanded edition had been in the press for a few weeks, but on February 14, 1776, they announced in their own newspaper that “THIS DAY WILL BE PUBLISHED AND SOLD … THE NEW EDITION OF COMMON SENSE.”  The following day, they ran a new advertisement in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and then updated it on February 20.  To make that edition more appealing than any of the editions published by Bell, the Bradfords proclaimed, “The Additions which are here given, amount to upwards of one Third of any former Edition.”  They also acknowledged that Bell had been advertising “ADDITION to COMMON SENSE,” but they alerted readers that Bell was trying to pull a fast one.  The “ADDITIONS” that Bell marketed “consist of Pieces taken out of News Papers, and not written by the Author of COMMON SENSE.”  Paine had worked exclusively with the Bradfords on the “ADDITIONS and IMPROVEMENTS.”  The Bradfords also listed several booksellers who stocked their new edition.  Benjamin Towne, the printer of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, was not among them, but he certainly generated revenue from publishing the advertisements that the Bradfords and Bell submitted to his printing office.

Right next to the Bradfords’ advertisement, as had been the case on other occasions, appeared Bell’s advertisement for “Large ADDITIONS to COMMON SENSE.”  Those “ADDITIONS” included “the following interesting subjects,” “American Independency defended by Candidus,” and “The Propriety of Independancy, by Demophilus,” and “Observations on Lord North’s Conciliatory Plan, by Sincerus.”  This version of the advertisement added “The American Patriot’s Prayer,” left out of Bell’s previous notice, to entice prospective customers.  Bell also pirated “AN APPENDIX TO COMMON SENSE, together with an ADDRESS to the people called QUAKERS, on their Testimony concerning Kings and Government.”  Like the Bradfords, he charged “one shilling ONLY” and made “allowance to those who buy quantities.”  In other words, the printers of Common Sense and related materials offered discounts to retailers who purchased in volume to sell the pamphlet in their own shops and others who bought multiple copies to distribute to friends, relatives, and associates.  The contents of Paine’s political pamphlet made it popular, yet the advertisements in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and other newspapers also helped raise awareness of Common Sense.